


fading carcosa

by missdulcerosea



Category: The King in Yellow - Robert W. Chambers
Genre: Aftermath of tragedy, Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:47:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23461939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missdulcerosea/pseuds/missdulcerosea
Summary: Hastur gives her one last chance, an anchor to grab onto. She takes it.
Relationships: Camilla (King in Yellow)/Hastur (Cthulhu Mythos)
Kudos: 6





	fading carcosa

She only takes Hastur’s hand because there is nowhere else to go. 

Indeed, Camilla has nothing left. The fire eats away at everything she knows, consuming it all in bursts of orange and yellow. Yhtill is dead and gone, the royal family’s corpses burning away to nothing but ashes. And Camilla denied it up to now: She tried to chase away the yellow that slowly overtook her vision.

Hastur is the one who finds her - the one who took away everything else.

_ You are different than your family _ , he tells her.  _ You seek atonement. _

Yes, she thinks, and you know very well as to why. You were right when you took a look inside my mind and said that I was not happy, even though I tried to say that it wasn’t so. You knew of what my brothers were like when you went into their heads, you saw how it took its toll on me. I was scared, convinced that everything in my life was my fault from the moment I was born. And it hurts more than you will ever know.

Hastur cannot fix things. Or rather he can, but not the way she wants them to be. For you see, when he puts Camilla back together he twists her into something that is not the same, a crude doppelganger of what once was. So he stitches her back together and gives her a crown heavy with jewels that she is indifferent to, drapes her in new clothes to make her his queen. Queen of not the ruins of Yhtill, but of fair Carcosa - the land she has heard about so often in the ballads, with its yellow sky dotted with peat-black stars. She dances on this stage as another actress again, and cannot understand what it is for Hastur that sets her a cut above the rest. 

Camilla of Yhtill is not quite gone. Hastur asks his queen to spread his message, to tell the worlds upon worlds beyond her home of fair Carcosa in the form of words. So when she does she takes what last bit of Camilla of Yhtill there is and puts her in an ink bottle so she won’t have to rip her apart. She tells what she can remember of her story: The story of a royal family that Hastur unravelled apart, dissected and broke and methodically tore to pieces bit by bit. It is her last and only act of rebellion, because maybe if she’d rebelled earlier there would not be tatters left of her tapestry.

Her ink runs out. The play is finished. She casts away Thale and Cassilda and the other actors of the play she had walked about on stage with for so long, and Camilla of Yhtill is dead. Now there is just Hastur’s queen that remains.

And to be a queen, the crown weighing so heavy on the head, means nothing to her anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> ...alright, so even if i wrote this little snippet with intent of what it means i think it's vague enough that people might take away different things.
> 
> anyways it's kind of hard to explain the dynamic that my versions of hastur and camilla have without giving away the rest of the story? because there is more, and... hoo boy it is a doozy. but i had quite a bit of fun writing this, it's a character study of camilla if you will.
> 
> thanks for reading! take care~


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